I vividly recall the first television pictures of the terrible and criminal attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on what has become known as 9/11. I was at the University of Birmingham on 11 September 2001, attending a churches' conference on China. It was hard to take in what was going on, but we were all vaguely aware as we viewed these unfathomable images that the reaction to these events would shape the course of history for years to come; and so it has proved.

Over the past ten years we have witnessed the birth of the neologism '9/11' and the horrid and inaccurate phrase 'global war on terror'. Some of what happened in those ten intervening years is now history, says Harry Hagopian. But much of it continues to resonate across the globe, calling us to a change of outlook and action. Revolutions and popular revolts across the Middle East and North Africa region vindicate the standpoint that real changes should come from within and do not necessarily get imposed militarily upon a whole people anymore.

The World Council of Churches has produced the following prayer to mark the tenth anniversary of the '9/1' attacks in the USA, on 11 September 2001, and the conflict and war that has continued since then.

The head of the the World Council of Churches, which brings together over 340 major Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican, Peace Church and indigenous Christian communions in conversation with the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, is from Norway - a country which has been exposed to the horror of terrorism recently.

What are the principal lessons of the ten years of war since the 11 September 2001 attacks? Paul Rogers, professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, gives some crisp answers. He has played a prominent role in the Oxford Research Group, has written extensively on related global and regional issues, and his first openDemocracy column was published a few days after 9/11.